Paint the Droids Red

I found some Star Wars Attacktix Super Battle Droids at the local Goodwill store many months ago.  I had 
intended to use them in the Monkey Skirmish games I've been playing with my daughter, but they 
were too small to look good with Papo size figures.She didn't care, but it bugged me.  
They were too big to use with my Star Wars Unleashed figures, so I stored them away.

Fast forward to a few months ago when I started to get back into collecting and painting mecha.  I'm not picky, I like Battlemechs, Titans, Golems, Robotech Battloids, Gears from Heavy Gear, you name it.   As I was assembling a 1/400th Gundam that I bought on Ebay, my daughter was watching 
"The Clone Wars" on Netflix and wanted to know if I had any "clankers" as the battle droids are 
called on the show.  I remembered the Super Battle Droids in storage and said yes. I needed to see
 if they scaled with my other figures.  

As luck would have it, they were pretty close, if you didn't add in the base, which was pretty tall. 
 They would need some modification, however, as the picture shows below.

I used an Exacto knife to remove them from their bases and to remove the oversized weapon.
  This left me with a bit of a dilemma, because all the droids had left for armament were some small 
blasters, fine for dealing with clones, but fairly paltry compared to even a light mech.
 Luckily there are several purveyors of
 bits on Ebay, and I purchased various weapons.  The ones that looked best, in my opinion were the
 Tau multimeltas.  I used greenstuff to attach them to the arm that held the ginormous missile
 launcher.  Then it was time for painting.  Since these were for my daughter, I consulted her on colors and she went with red.

So here they are, with a Mechwarrior: Dark Age Hatchetman for reference.   

  

Ne Plus Ultramarine!

I finally got enough time from the hectic schedule of work and family to finish assembling the figs I’ve been working on. I even managed to paint one!

I hemmed and hawed over what chapter colours to use. Space Wolves? Blood Angels? Dark Angels? I decided on the Ultramarines based on an old illustration from my WH40K compendium:

With that image in mind I put brush to fig and began to paint.  At first I was going to skip the undercoat( I know, I know, but I was getting pressed for time), but the ultramarine blue I bought form the art store turned a deep navy when painted over the red polymer clay. However, it was a nice blue when I pained the arms, which were made out of craft foam.  Ok, undercoating it is.  Unfortunately, the acrylics I picked up from our fine local craft store did not really coat worth a dang, even after being shaken like one of 007’s martinis.  Much more like a wash than paint.  That’s what I get for not going with Ceramcoat or artists paints.  My mother-in-law used to repair porcelain and dolls, so she pointed me to her store of older acrylics, which I dug into, finding some white.  It was pretty chalky, but I managed to get in smoothed out. Or so I thought.

Once undercoated, I started with the base coat of blue. I may have rushed things a bit and the undercoat wasn’t quite dry as the white seemed to bleed through. I pressed on and hoped for the best.  I plan on repainting it, but I do like how it turned out, despite the brushstrokes showing. 

I also made some adversaries.  I was trying to make Eldar helmets, intending to use them as the Rogue Trader era Eldar pirates, but I couldn’t get it right, so I went with this shape instead.

It's only  a base coat with no dry brushing, but I like the look of these guys.  Next up is painting the rest and figuring out transport of each squad. I’m also going to head over to the local GW enclave and pick up some sand for the bases and maybe some green stuff to make feet.